Chapter V: Asolo Gate

The air is drenched to the stars
With fragrance of flowering grape
Where the hills hunch up from the plain
To the purple dark ridges that sweep
Towards the flowery-pale peaks and the snow.

Faint as the peaks in the glister of starlight,
A figure on a silver-tinkling snow-white mule
Climbs the steeply twining stony road
Through murmuring vineyards to the gate
That gaps with black the wan starlight.

The watchman on his three-legged stool
Drowses in his beard, dreams
He is a boy walking with strong strides
Of slender thighs down a wet road,
Where flakes of violet-colored April sky
Have brimmed the many puddles till the road
Is as a tattered path across another sky.

The watchman on his three-legged stool,
Sits snoring in his beard;
His dream is full of flowers massed in meadowland,
Of larks and thrushes singing in the dawn,
Of touch of women's lips and twining hands,
And madness of the sprouting spring ...
His ears a-sudden ring with the shrill cry:
Open watchman of the gate,
It is I, the Cyprian.

--It is ruled by the burghers of this town
Of Asolo, that from sundown
To dawn no stranger shall come in,
Be he even emperor, or doge's kin.
--Open, watchman of the gate,
It is I, the Cyprian.
--Much scandal has been made of late
By wandering women in this town.
The laws forbid the opening of the gate
Till next day once the sun is down.
--Watchman know that I who wait
Am Queen of Jerusalem, Queen
Of Cypress, Lady of Asolo, friend
Of the Doge and the Venetian State.

There is a sound of drums, and torches flare
Dims the star-swarm, and war-horns' braying
Drowns the fiddling of crickets in the wall,
Hoofs strike fire on the flinty road,
Mules in damasked silk caparisoned
Climb in long train, strange shadows in torchlight,
The road that winds to the city gate.

The watchman, fumbling with his keys,
Mumbles in his beard:--Had thought
She was another Cyprian, strange the dreams
That come when one has eaten tripe.
The great gates creak and groan,
The hinges shriek, and the Queen's white mule
Stalks slowly through.

The watchman, in the shadow of the wall,
Looks out with heavy eyes:--Strange,
What cavalcade is this that clatters into Asolo?
These are not men-at-arms,
These ruddy boys with vineleaves in their hair!
That great-bellied one no seneschal
Can be, astride an ass so gauntily!
Virgin Mother! Saints! They wear no clothes!

And through the gate a warm wind blows,
A dizzying perfume of the grape,
And a great throng crying Cypris,
Cyprian, with cymbals crashing and a shriek
Of Thessalian pipes, and swaying of torches,
That smell hot like wineskins of resin,
That flare on arms empurpled and hot cheeks,
And full shouting lips vermillion-red.

Youths and girls with streaming hair
Pelting the night with flowers:
Yellow blooms of Adonis, white
scented stars of pale Narcissus,
Mad incense of the blooming vine,
And carmine passion of pomegranate blooms.

A-sudden all the strummings of the night,
All the insect-stirrings, all the rustlings
Of budding leaves, the sing-song
Of waters brightly gurgling through meadowland,
Are shouting with the shouting throng,
Crying Cypris, Cyprian,
Queen of the seafoam, Queen of the budding year,
Queen of eyes that flame and hands that twine,
Return to us, return from the fields of asphodel.

And all the grey town of Asolo
Is full of lutes and songs of love,
And vows exchanged from balcony to balcony
Across the singing streets ...
But in the garden of the nunnery,
Of the sisters of poverty, daughters of dust,
The cock crows. The cock crows.

The watchman rubs his old ribbed brow:
Through the gate, in silk all dusty from the road,
Into the grey town asleep under the stars,
On tired mules and lean old war-horses
Comes a crowd of quarrelling men-at-arms
After a much-veiled lady with a falcon on her wrist.
--This Asolo? What a nasty silent town
He sends me to, that dull old doge.

And you, watchman, I've told you thrice
That I am Cypress's Queen, Jerusalem's,
And Lady of this dull village, Asolo;
Tend your gates better. Are you deaf,
That you stand blinking at me, pulling at your dirty beard?
You shall be thrashed, when I rule Asolo.
--What strange dreams, mumbled in his beard
The ancient watchman, come from eating tripe.